The Trail to Buddha's Mirror

by Don Winslow

  “In the hotel … very convenient.”

  “There is of course a modest reward, and a healthy sum of money in it for Miss Li, if we can locate her.”

  “I understand.”

  So will Miss Li, if she gets the word. The name Neal Carey will ring a clanging bell. Hi, remember me? Last time you saw me I was dead.

  He hit three more galleries in the next hour, working his way north up Nathan Road. None of them sold Li Lan’s paintings, nor had the staffs ever heard of her. Neal made a turn south and headed back down, picking up four more galleries on side streets before he got back to the hotel. The first clerk dismissed him perfunctorily as unlikely to buy anything, the second was a polite young Chinese man who displayed great interest but offered no useful information. The third was an avant-garde place where the young owner thought she might have met Li Lan at a gallery showing on the island once, and the fourth spoke no English at all, but took a flyer. During this entire walk, Neal caught a glimpse of Ben Chin only once, and another time he thought he saw the Doorman in a crowd of people in front of him.

  Neal stopped at the hotel desk to check for messages. There weren’t any, so he headed south down Nathan Road, into the heart of the expensive tourist district of Tsimshatsui. The day had turned hot and sunny. Tourists, shoppers, and the regular denizens crowded the sidewalks. Neal visited three galleries within the next six blocks. Nobody in any of them had ever heard of an artist named Li Lan, and nobody recognized the woman in the photograph. Neal left the flyers behind.

  Two hours and four more shops found him down at Star Ferry Pier, the southernmost point of Kowloon. He could see the gray skyscrapers of Hong Kong Island ahead of him across Kowloon Bay. Victoria Peak loomed above the high-rises like a watchful landlady. Neal spotted the Doorman ahead of him on the runway to the ferry. The Doorman glanced at him nervously, his eyes flicking ahead to the ferry and behind Neal to his boss. Neal read the gesture: Was he planning to board the ferry and cross over to Hong Kong Island? That would take special arrangements. Neal pivoted back toward Nathan Road and strode away from the pier. He could feel rather than see Chin’s net shifting northward, and knew that the Doorman would be running to retake the lead position. Neal slowed down to make his job a little easier in the midday heat.

  Neal decided that he would hit the galleries on Hong Kong Island the next day. It was time to become a slower prey and let the predator catch his scent. If anyone was out there sniffing the air, they could hardly miss it. Just to make sure, he turned east along Salisbury Road and headed for the Peninsula Hotel. If there was a place to see and be seen in Kowloon, it was the Peninsula.

  The Peninsula Hotel had once been the end of the road, a place where weary travelers stayed before boarding the Orient Express for the long trip back to the West. Its architecture was classic British colonial: a broad veranda, large columns, and white paint. The veranda, now enclosed in modern glass, sheltered a tearoom and featured a view of the bay and Hong Kong Island. The locals who were jaded to that panorama came for a vantage point from which they could observe just who was taking tea with whom, and what romantic liaisons or commercial conspiracies could be inferred from the comings and goings in the Peninsula lobby.

  Neal paused halfway up the broad steps to the Peninsula and stood gawking at the view, which was his way of announcing to Chin, the boys, and whoever else was interested, “Hello! I’m going into the Peninsula Hotel now!”

  The waiter sat him at a single table in the middle of the enormous tearoom. Neal ordered a pot of coffee, an iced tea, and a chicken sandwich and then settled in to do what everybody else was doing, surreptitiously checking each other out.

  It was a well-heeled crowd, the prices at the Peninsula being somewhat steep, and the room had a self-congratulatory air that added to the incestuous feeling. The customers were mostly white, with a sizable minority of conservatively dressed Chinese who had yet to lose the slightly defensive expression inherited from the days when they had been welcomed only as waiters. A large tourist contingent, mostly gray-haired Europeans, rounded out the crowd. The chatter was subdued and desultory; people were too busy looking over their companions’ shoulders to engage in any really direct conversation.

  Neal could just make out the Doorman loitering in the outer lobby, and he didn’t so much as lift an eyebrow when Mark Chin took a single table nearby and began to ogle every woman in the room who looked like she might be under eighty years of age.

  Neal polished off the meal, paid the exorbitant check, and took his sweet time getting up and leaving. He hit five more shops on his way back to the Banyan Tree. Li Lan’s name didn’t ring a bell in any of them, not a tinkle or a chime.

  He worked his way back to the Banyan Tree. He wasn’t surprised to see the Doorman lurking in the hallway outside his room.

  “How are you doing?” Neal asked him.

  The Doorman nodded and smiled shyly.

  “Okay,” he said, trying out the word.

  “Okay.”

  Jesus, Neal thought, he looks about twelve years old.

  Then it occurred to him that he had been younger than that when he started working the streets for Friends.

  The Doorman was still standing there, as if he wanted to say something but was afraid.

  “You want to come in?” Neal asked.

  The Doorman smiled. He didn’t understand a word.

  “A drink? Uhhh … Coca-Cola?”

  The Doorman tapped his wrist and then pointed at Neal’s. Neal looked at the inexpensive Timex watch he had bought at least three years ago.

  “The watch? You like the watch?”

  The Doorman nodded enthusiastically.

  Neal took it off his wrist and handed it to the Doorman. Apparently the Doorman didn’t rate a watch in the peculiar pecking order of the gang. The Doorman strapped it to his wrist and held it up to his face to admire it.

  Shit, why not?

  “Listen,” Neal said. “I need it now. I’ll buy one tomorrow and you can have this one. Or you can have the new one, okay?”

  He held out his hand for the watch. The Doorman took it off his wrist and put it in Neal’s hand. He looked fucking heartbroken.

  “Tomorrow,” Neal said. Hell, how do I explain? He traced his index finger along the dial of the watch and moved it in a circle twelve times. “Tomorrow?”

  The Doorman grinned and nodded.

  Neal pointed at the Doorman’s wrist. “Tomorrow it’s yours. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. I’m going to grab some sleep.”

  The Doorman bowed and backed off around the corner. Neal went into the room and made himself a scotch. He sipped at it while he tried to read some Fathom and then gave up and flopped down on the bed. He was beat.

  The phone woke him up. The digital clock on the radio said it was four-twenty in the afternoon.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Stop it.”

  “I haven’t even started, Lan.”

  “Stop it. You do not know what you are doing.”

  “Why don’t you come here and tell me?”

  There was one of those long silences he was getting so used to on this gig.

  “Please,” she said. “Please leave us alone.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Someone will get hurt.”

  “That’s why I’ve been trying to find you. At first I thought you set me up for a bullet in the old hot tub the other night. Now I think maybe the shot was meant for Pendleton.”

  He didn’t get quite the reaction he expected, a gasp of horror or a gush of gratitude. It was almost a laugh.

  “Is that what you think?” she asked.

  “Maybe it’s what I hope.”

  “I am asking you again—please leave us alone. You are only helping them.”

  “Helping who?”

  “Stop this stupid searching you are doing. It is too dangerous.”

  If he hadn’t been half asleep, he could have mumbled something r
eally slick like, “Danger is my business, baby,” but instead he asked, “Dangerous for who?”

  “All of us.”

  “Where are you? I want to talk to you.”

  “You are talking with me.”

  Oh, yeah.

  “I want to see you.”

  “Please forget us. Forget me.”

  No, Li Lan, I can’t do either of those things.

  “Lan, I’m going to start again tomorrow. I’m going to hit every gallery and shop in Hong Kong. I’m going to pass your picture around the entire city and I’m going to make a spectacle of myself doing it unless you agree to meet me tonight.”

  Pause, pause, pause.

  “Wait one moment,” she said.

  He waited. He could hear her speaking, but could not make out the words. He wondered if she was talking to Pendleton.

  “The observatory on Victoria Peak at eight o’clock. Can you be there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell me to come alone?”

  “You are foolish with me. Yes, come alone.”

  She hung up.

  Neal felt his heart racing. If this is love, he thought, the poets can keep it. But three and a half hours sure seems like a long time.

  He ordered a wake-up call for six o’clock and lay awake until the phone rang.

  Getting to Victoria Peak wouldn’t be too tough, Neal thought. Getting there alone would be impossible. That’s what Ben Chin had told him, anyway.

  “No way,” Chin had said, with a firm shake of the head. He knocked back a hit of Neal’s scotch with equal firmness.

  “My checkbook, my rules, remember?”

  “That was different.”

  “How?”

  Neal had a scotch of his own sweating on the side table, untouched after the first sip.

  “You weren’t putting your butt on the line. Cousin Mark would be really pissed if I let you get killed.”

  “I’m not going to get killed.”

  “Why does she want to meet you at the Peak? Why not here at the hotel?”

  “She’s afraid and she doesn’t trust me. She wants to meet in a public place.”

  “Let her meet you on the ferry, then.”

  “You can’t run away on a ferry.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Neal sat down on the bed and slipped into his loafers.

  “I’m not going up there trailing your whole crew.”

  “You’ll never know we’re there.”

  “I told her I’d be alone.”

  “Did she tell you she’d be alone?”

  Good point.

  “No, I think she’ll be with her friend.”

  “I think she’ll be with a whole bunch of friends. You should be, too.”

  Neal stood up and put on his jacket.

  “No.”

  “Okay. Just me.”

  “No.”

  “How are you going to stop me from following you?”

  There was always that.

  “Okay, just you.”

  Chin smiled and polished off his drink.

  “But,” Neal said, “you stay in the background, out of sight and out of earshot. I want to talk to her alone. Once we make the meet and you see that it’s safe, you back off. Way off.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “So are you ready to go?”

  “It’s only six-thirty. We have plenty of time.”

  “I want to get there early.”

  “Love is a many-splendored thing.”

  “I don’t want to be set up again.”

  The rush onto the Star Ferry made a New York subway look like a spring cotillion. The same crowd that had been standing patiently and passively on the ramp moments earlier turned into an aggressive mob as soon as the entrance chain was dropped. Splitting into gangs, trios, couples, and the odd loner, the mob spilled onto the double-decked, double-ended old green-and-white vessel, flipping the backs across the benches to face forward.

  Neal, a survivor of the Broadway Local, just managed to stay on his feet as the crowd shot off the ramp and pushed him forward. He claimed an apparently scorned seat toward the rear of the boat and wondered how Ben Chin was going to stay with him. The boat filled up quickly and took off quickly. There was no time for lollygagging; the Star Ferry made the nine-minute crossing 455 times a day.

  It was some nine minutes. From sea level, Hong Kong’s skyscrapers loomed like castle keeps, their gray steel and glass standing in sharp contrast to the green hills above. A staggering array of boat traffic jammed the waters of the bay. Private water taxis zipped back and forth while old junks lumbered across. Sampan pilots struggled with their sculling oars to maneuver through the chop left by the motorboats. A tugboat guided a gigantic ocean liner into a dock on the Kowloon side.

  Lights began to glow in the early dusk, and neon reflections started to appear on the water, casting faint red, blue, and yellow shades on the bay, the boats, and even the ferry passengers. Neal’s arm dangled out the window, and he watched it change color as the neon sign proclaiming Tudor Whiskey flashed.

  Most of the passengers seemed unaffected by the scene. Only a handful of scattered tourists were paying any attention at all. The regular commuters talked or read newspapers or loudly spat sunflower seed hulls onto the deck. Ben Chin was just sitting, staring impassively ahead, three rows behind Neal.

  Neal leaned out to get a view of the Peak. His chest tightened. She’ll be there, he thought. What will she look like? What will she be wearing? What will she say? Will she be holding Pendleton’s hand? A fierce pang of jealousy ripped through him.

  Jesus, Neal, he told himself. At least try to remember the job, the gig. The job is about Pendleton, not Li Lan. Yeah, but you took yourself off the job, remember? There is no job. There won’t be any job. There’s only her.

  The crowd began to stir in anticipation of the docking. Neal stood up and resisted the impulse to look behind him. Chin would doubtless pick him up. The crew dropped the chains and the mob surged off the boat.

  Neal had studied his guidebook and knew where to go. He came off the dock and crossed wide, busy Connaught Road and headed up past City Hall to Des Voeux Road, where he took a left and found the tramway station on the bottom of Garden Road.

  He waited about five minutes for the small green-and-white funicular car to arrive, then found a window seat on the right side toward the front. Chin sat down on the left-side aisle toward the rear. Neal didn’t see any of Chin’s crew, and figured that the gang leader had kept his word.

  The tram started with a jerk and began to pull up the steep slope of the peak. Most of the commuters got off on the lower two stops at Kennedy Road and Macdonnell Road. Thick vegetation of bamboo and fir trees flanked the narrow tram line on both sides, and sheer rock ledges showed where the line had been blasted through. At times the grade was so steep that the tram car seemed to defy gravity, and Neal felt that it would pitch over backward, tumbling them down on top of the tall commercial buildings that seemed to stand directly beneath and behind. He had an image of the steel cable snapping from the strain and the car hurtling backward through the air, end over end, until it finally crashed into the concrete and steel of the city below. Neal was afraid of heights.

  The tram finally pulled into the Upper Peak Station. Neal got off on shaky legs. She had told him to meet her at the observatory. It wasn’t hard to find, being only a few feet to the left of the station. He was forty minutes early for the meet, but he took a quick look around to make sure she wasn’t there. She wasn’t, and he turned his attention to the scene beneath him.

  The view stretched out in the distance to the New Territories and the Chinese border, hidden in the brown hills that were going gray in the late dusk. Neal could see the entire Kowloon peninsula laid out in front of the hills, its concrete tenements, rows of docks, hotels, and bars beginning to glow with the lights that were blinking on as night came and people arrived back at t
heir homes. The Star Ferry pier glowed in bright neon, and boats in the bay turned on their navigation lights. Directly beneath him, Neal watched the commercial towers of Hong Kong turn into giant pillars of light in the gathering darkness.

  Neal stood on the observation deck watching day turn to night. It was like seeing a bland watercolor landscape change into a garish movie screen filled with electric greens, hot reds, cool blues, and shimmering golds. Hong Kong was a glimmering jewel necklace on a black dress, an invitation to explore a woman’s secrets, a fantasy that tiptoed on the knife edge between a nightmare and a dream.

  He forced himself to turn away from the panorama and reconnoiter the area. He took a right on the narrow paved walkway called Lugard Road, which led around the edge of the peak through the thick forests and gardens. A low stone wall bordered the downhill side of the trail, and informal footpaths led off into the woods on the uphill side. There were frequent turnoffs with benches where one could enjoy different perspectives of the stunning view below, but most of the tourists went no farther than the observatory, and the trail was almost deserted save for a few young lovers and a couple of joggers. Neal walked along the trail for about ten minutes and then turned around and went back to the observatory. He hadn’t seen anything suspicious, nothing that looked like a trap or an ambush. He checked his watch: twenty minutes. He walked down to the tram station and waited.

  What am I actually going to do? Neal wondered. Just tell her that someone is trying to grease the good doctor? She seems to know that already. Tell her that I think the CIA has a serious grudge against Bobby-baby and may want to waste both of them? Ask her if she tried to kill me back in groovy Mill Valley? Would she tell me if she did? Tell her I’m in love with her, that I’ve dumped my job and my education to follow her, that I can’t live without her? What will she do? Dump Pendleton on the spot and take the tram down with me? Hold my hand? Run away with me? Just what the hell am I doing here, anyway?

  He looked around and saw Chin loitering on the hill above him. They exchanged a quick time-to-get-going look, and Neal started himself up toward the observatory. Maybe it’s just another dodge, he thought. Maybe she won’t be here at all.

  She was there. Right on time and alone. Neal felt a twinge of guilt as he looked at her. She stood on the observatory deck where it joined Lugard Road. She looked splendid. She was wearing a loose black blouse over jeans and tennis shoes. Her hair hung long and straight, parted in the middle, and her blue comb was fastened to the left of the part. The view behind her turned to mere background. She looked directly at Neal and gestured quickly for him to follow her up Lugard Road.